It’s official: the Biden-Harris administration hates independent contractors. Earlier this year, the Department of Labor enacted a labyrinthine series of regulations (aren’t regulations always too complex for their own good?) reclassifying various types of independent contractors as employees.
Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su headed up the California Department of Labor, and under her leadership, the state shepherded through the disastrous AB5 legislation, which turned independent contractors into employees at the behest of labor unions — even though the vast majority of freelancers and other independent contractors do what they do because they don’t want to be employees. Now, Su has done the same thing at the federal level by executive fiat.
The California Supreme Court came to the rescue last month and softened some of the state’s regulations on freelancers and gig workers, as Rick Moran reported. However, the national regulations are still stirring up controversy.
Two of the nation’s largest trucking organizations have found themselves at odds over the administration’s independent contractor regulations. Earlier this month, Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), penned an op-ed at Transport Topics decrying Su’s bureaucratic meddling.
Spear wrote:
As California’s chief labor regulator, Su oversaw implementation of the devastating law known as AB 5, which decimated independent contracting and forced professional drivers into an unimaginable situation: Either pick up and move your life elsewhere, or risk everything you’ve worked for being taken away. In her current role, Su has demonstrated the same hostility toward ICs, refusing to listen to their perspectives and showing contempt for their choice in how to earn a living.
Rather than moderate her positions, Su has doubled down in Washington, pressing the bounds of her authority to tip the scales and remake the nation’s labor laws in California’s image. It’s the reason her nomination to serve as secretary of labor has languished in the Senate for nearly a year and a half. Nobody in our industry should support the radical agenda Su hatched in California and is trying to export nationwide.
Spear also noted that the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) is one of the groups opposed to Su’s nomination, yet the OOIDA agrees with the Department of Labor’s regulations, which he says makes standards more complicated and prone to litigation. He called the OOIDA out on its advocacy.
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“It’s astonishing then to hear that OOIDA, which purports to represent the interests of independent truckers, has had a change of heart and is now endorsing Su’s disastrous IC rule — her signature policy as acting secretary,” Spear wrote. He later added:
Going so far as to parrot her dubious claims about the regulation in comments to lawmakers, an OOIDA official gave empty assurance to independent truckers that the rule would have no effect on them if they “are in a compliant lease working for a carrier with a lease agreement.” In other words, if you like your IC plan, you can keep your IC plan. But like another infamous broken promise from Washington, this will certainly not be the case in practice.
Spear’s remarks came after the OOIDA’s Lewie Pugh testified before Congress about what he sees as federal overregulation in the trucking industry. Pugh lambasted multiple burdens that the federal government is placing on truckers and trucking companies.
“Pugh ripped into various government mandates that are in place, pending or loosely proposed,” John Kingston of FreightWaves reported this week about Pugh’s July 24 testimony. “Speed limiters came in for particularly strong criticism from Pugh, and his opening comments were a broadside against what OOIDA sees as excessive government regulation.”
“While compliance rates have never been higher, there are those including large motor carriers, shippers, safety advocates and elected officials along with bureaucrats who not only resist modernizing or eliminating needless regulations, but want to impose even more rules on the American trucker,” Pugh told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit.
But one almost offhand comment drew the ire of Spears and the ATA. When a legislator asked Pugh his views on the Department of Labor’s independent contractor regulations, he replied, “We’re good with the new rule.”
Interestingly enough, the ATA and the OOIDA are working together on the lawsuit to keep California from using AB5 against truck drivers. However, the tension between the two groups simmers over the federal regulation.
“It’s laughable to think that these folks give a hoot about small business truckers, because they never have,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer told FreightWaves. “They’ve been on the wrong side of every issue for the last 40 years.”
FreightWaves founder Craig Fuller has offered the two organizations an opportunity to debate the issue at the site’s F3 Conference in November. As of this writing, neither organization has signed on, but until then, they’ll continue to be at loggerheads on this crucial issue.
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